Robert Duncan, the major, local poet - born in Oakland in 1919 - worked at the Poetry Center at San Francisco State and also wrote, produced and starred in his own play, "Faust Foutu," in which he undressed onstage and proclaimed to the wide-eyed audience, "This is my body." Ginsberg stole his act and never gave him credit.

Michael Rumaker recalls those heady days in his candid memoir, "Robert Duncan in San Francisco," which describes what it was like to be "queer" in an era in which men who lived with and loved other men were often persecuted unless they managed to remain in the closet. Duncan was out - way out. He published an essay, "The Homosexual in Society," in Politics, a lefty magazine in 1944, six years before San Francisco's Henry Hay founded the Mattachine Society, one of the first organizations in America by and for open homosexuals.

Rumaker, who was born in 1932, was one of Duncan's students while he attended the famous Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Rumaker's first book, "The Butterfly" (1962), offers a fictionalized account of his affair with Yoko Ono, later of John Lennon fame. In "A Day and a Night at the Baths" (1979), he wrote without the shield of fiction about his life as a gay man in the city that would become world renowned for its gay population.

"Robert Duncan in San Francisco" has been reissued with never-before-published letters between Rumaker and Duncan, and an interview with Rumaker, who talks frankly about writing. "You have to really bare yourself," he says. "I don't mean you need to bleed at the public wall or something, but you have to be honest to be a writer."

The book looks at the intriguing relationship between the famous, their fans and the soon-to-be famous. The descriptions of San Francisco gay life in the 1950s are mostly tender - though mean police officers occasionally appear - and seem now oh, so sweet and oh, so innocent.